Over the Border: A Novel

If she made a little face, she was still secretly pleased. “That’s what one gets for being a girl, but I suppose I’ll have to put up with it.” Turning to the mozo, she gave him his orders in Spanish: “The señor will go with me. You may ride on to Los Arboles and tell Don Sliver, the gringo señor, where we have gone.”

Disconcertion showed through the man’s peon immobility. But with an obsequious “Si, señorita!” he rode on, but stopped over the next rise, dismounted, and crawled back to the crest on his belly.

Lying there, he watched them riding in a direction that showed them to be taking the short cut through the hills. Till they passed out of sight he lay quietly. Then, after carefully clearing a patch of ground, he built a small fire of the dry grass and twigs and covered it with the succulent green leaves of a Spanish bayonet.

Instantly there rose on the still air a dense smoke column. Till it soared to its full height he waited. Then, alternately covering and lifting his scrape from the fire, he sent a succession of great smoke puffs rolling on high. Whereafter he stamped out the fire and, grinning, mounted and rode away.

About that time Lee and Gordon were entering the ravine. A slight embarrassment rose between them as they drew near the fonda. But in place of Felicia’s smooth, dark face the wrinkled, purblind visage of old Antonio appeared at the bar window, where he was serving anarriero whose loaded mules cropped the lush grass along the stream.

As they passed Lee looked quickly at Gordon. But meeting and reading her glance, he laughed and raised his right hand in attestation. Disarmed, she shook her finger, and the next minute their horses had scrambled around the bend, past the spot whence she had looked down and seen the kiss, into neutral territory.

Half an hour put them at the head of the staircase from where, as on the night they had brought home the raiders, they looked over spur and ridge to the distant plains. Then it had all been washed in the crimson and violet and gold of sunset. Now, beyond the black chaparral, that undulated like a woman’s mantle over the shoulders and breasts of the hills, the plains lay to the eye, a sea of undulating gold flecked with green isles, trees, and far fields of growing corn. Mountains and plains, cañon and ravine, it was just as wild, infinitely beautiful in one mood as the other.

“A wonderful land!” Gordon breathed it.

Could his eyes have gone with the curving meridians over its length and its breadth, have followed the dim, blue ranges in their course across brazen deserts, to the deep forests, eternal snows of the Sierra Madres; then ranged south across the great central plateau rich in cotton, corn, and cane; have slid with lacy streams down the cañons, streets of the mountains that led into the tangled jungles where coffee and cocoa, rubber and tobacco, palms and bananas, sage, rice, spices, flourish in the languid tropics; could he have taken the land in its entirety, richer in its beauty, variety of crops, fruits, plants, than the fabled Garden of Eden – could he have done all this, even then imagination would have fallen far below the reality. Yet he saw enough to stimulate him to prophecy.

“Some day, when all this petty revolutionary business is squelched, this is going to be part of the greatest nation on earth.”

That set them planning again, and while they talked the largest army yet brought forth by successive revolutions was in process of disintegration but an eagle’s flight away. Following battle and retreat across sun-struck desert where thirst slew more than lead or steel, it was scattering fiery chaff blown by cannon’s blast over the face of the land to set it aflame with minor disorders. Beyond the farthest blue range columns of smoke marked the sites of a hundred burninghaciendas. With them, under the pitiless sky, rose the groans and cries of the wounded and tortured, wailing of ravished women.

In present ignorance of this, unconscious, again, of the keen eyes that had spied the mozo’s signal and were now watching them from the chaparral half a mile ahead, they rode on.

“Why waste good rope? One shoots him out of the saddle with ease.”

If the voices had not been pitched low, Lee and Gordon, now only a few hundred yards away, might have heard the argument.

She would easily have recognized Ramon’s voice. “True, amigo, and I love him less than thou; would kill him the quicker but for my promise to his compañero. While he held me under his rifle, I gave it – to make no attempt on their lives.”

“A promise?” A low, hard laugh issued from the covert. “What is it but a deadfall for one’s enemy? If all those I have broken, to men killed, women deceived, rise against me on the last day, Satan will be put to it to find a hot enough corner in hell. But I gave no promise – and he killed Tomas, my man. If your stomach turns at the job, leave him to me.”

“No, no!” Ramon’s voice rose in quick protest. “His killing would still be at my hands. Also” – the addition came in lower tones – “I would rather he lived – to suffer the furies I have suffered when he thinks of her in my arms. No, señor, we will rope him from behind.”

“Bueno! Have it thy – ” A sharp hiss cut them off.

Very cunningly they had taken up their positions at the head and foot of a slippery steep where loose rubble bank and a narrow passage through thick chaparral would allow only one horse to go down at a time. Ramon, with two of the revolutionists, crouched above, while the leader, with the others, hid at the foot. He had no more than gained back to his men before Lee and Gordon appeared silhouetted against the sky above.

She was in the lead, so close that Ramon could almost have touched her stirrup as she looked back at Gordon. “I’ll go down first. If I break my neck you can pick up the remains.”

Really anxious, he watched her go slipping and sliding, most of the way on her beast’s haunches, but at every stumble she picked it up with skilful use of the bridle.

“Come on!” she called back, laughing.

But before he could move, before she could even turn to look back, the noose of a riata writhed like a smoke ring out over the chaparral and was drawn with a swift, hard pull around her arms. At the same moment a man leaped and seized her bridle while the leader cinched her feet under her horse’s belly.

“Run!” From above Gordon saw her white, desperate face turned over her shoulder. “Run! Oh, run!”

He could not – had he wished it. It happened so quickly that he had barely time to use the spur, and if Ramon’s cast had been made a second sooner he would have been roped before his beast moved. As it was, the loop settled diagonally across his left arm and right shoulder. The next second he went flying backward out of the saddle and landed heavily. While he was still in the air, however, his hand had gone to his gun. Now he turned it loose downhill.

That it would shoot nine shots in eight seconds was its maker’s boast, and the weapon proved it. Aware that he might kill Lee, but conscious through his blind confusion that it might be worse, he emptied the clip, shooting close to the ground.

His aim, erratic enough, was rendered more so by the desperate tugging of the revolutionists on the rope. Like spray from a swinging nozzle, the bullets flew right and left, all but one, which went through the leader’s head. Then, a couple of whips of the rope caught the free arm in against his body.

At the foot of the hill the men were examining their fallen leader. “He has killed him, el capitan! Cut his throat, the gringo swine!”

Eyes glittering in his villainous, pock-marked face, one of them snatched out his knife and came rushing uphill.

Gordon knew it for the end, felt the chill of death. If he could only have risen and fought them! But to lie there, bound and impotent, while the knife was drawn across his throat! To pass out into the blackness and leave Lee to face her fate! He struggled fiercely, striving to break his bonds. As he relapsed in cold despair, Lee’s voice, shrill in its mortal terror, rang out:

“If he is hurt, Ramon, I shall hate you forever!”

To give him due, Ramon was already stepping forward. A sudden writhing, like the first quiver of boiling water, passed over his face. He looked, but without answer raised a warning hand. “The gringo is not to be harmed, hombre.”

“But he has killed el capitan. Also he shot Tomas, our compañero.”

“The fortune of war, amigo. I passed my word to one that held my own life in the hollow of his hand.”

Gun in hand, he faced the revolutionist who stood fumbling his knife. Out of the situation it appeared that only tragedy could issue. But in all the world there is nothing more mercurial than the moods of apeon. Behind them rose a coarse laugh.

“Santisima Trinidad! why quarrel over a dead man, Ilarian? Hast thou forgotten the ten strokes with the flat of his saber el capitan gave thee for wasting rifle cartridges on rabbits before the fight of El Ojo? As for Tomas – I owed him ten pesos. Also, there are now but four of us to divide this señor’s money.”

The argument reached down to their bandit instincts. “Bueno, Rafael, bueno!” Another called: “Trust thee to see a peso through a dead man’s shirt. Put up thy knife, Ilarian. It was Tomas’s throat it flashed at last when he took Catalina, the pretty mestiza, away from thee.”

The fellow still stood, undecided. He had drawn the knife. Dislike to back down kept him muttering and bristling like an angry dog till Ramon pulled a roll of notes from his breast.

“Here, hombre.”

The man’s huge mouth split in a grin. In his eagerness to secure his share, the fourth man came running uphill, dragging Lee’s horse by the bridle, and while they argued over the division and gambled for the last odd note, she spoke in English.

“I would never have thought to find you in alliance with bandits against me. Why did you do it? It can only bring disaster.” From which she ran on, touching with all her strength and skill on the chords of memory – their childhood, budding youth, incident, fond reminiscence, her own faith in his goodness, pride in his honor. “And now would you destroy it all? The respect and affection I have always had for you? And what have you to gain by it? Surely not my love.”

She thought he was shaken. Looking into his face, she had been shocked and astonished at the change wrought in a few days. Like mountain slopes stripped of their verdure, burned down to the hard slag by volcanic fires, so its softness and youth were gone, leaving in bold relief the hard lines of passion and hate. For one moment a quiver shook its grimness. But there was no softening of the burning eyes, for it took out of bitter anger.

“What have I to gain?” He threw up his head in defiance. “You! with love or without it!”

By its very unnaturalness his quiet was more ominous than his violent outpourings of the other day. She took her breath in sudden fear.

“Ramon, what are you going to do?”

Danger inhered in a light shrug, with its defiance of consequences. “Take you to San Angel – to be married, hard and tight, by jefe and priest.”

“Oh, but they will not do it! They were friends of my father; have known me from childhood – ”

“They are Mexican – would love to see you mate with me, a Mexican like themselves. They will do as I say. If not” – his nod carried a sinister significance – “so much the worse for you.”

Unable to believe, she stared down at him; as she looked into the brilliant, hard eyes there was borne in upon her understanding of his insane egotism. The veneer of softness, courtesy, lip service, burned away; there was left only the animal fighting for the possession of its mate.

She bent her head in sudden shame. “Ramon, please take me home.”